The blessings of steemit continue, and the farm continues to grow. Now, we are even beginning to head into the next generation of livestock! We have been busy lately taking care of our animals, and we have even decided to start breeding some. In light of over 300 upvotes from my recent post The Long Strange Journey Home Part 2 of 6 - The Food Supply, I thought that I would do a farm update today and perhaps a garden update later this weekend. The animals that we are raising is one source of food for us, and the garden is another.

We spent some time outside with the animals today, and I took some photos to share with everyone.

CHICKENS

Recently, we have had a few new additions to the poultry section of our homestead. First, @smailer bought us this Turken Rooster named "Roosty."

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Then, @felixxx and @dresden teamed up to buy these beautiful hens for us. We are still debating the names, but they are beautiful. They have not started laying yet, but they like to spend the night with Roosty, and head to his chicken tractor each evening.

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We still have our original five laying hens, and they are producing very well.

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I made some "nesting boxes" in the back of the hen's chicken tractor, and they have been using them.

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Since we have a good supply of eggs right now anyway, and since the roosters really like the hens, we will start incubating some to see how the chicks are. If the Bantam/Cochin mix roosters can produce large enough offspring, we'll keep letting them breed with the hens. Roosty gets in on the action too, so hopefully we will have some chicks that are part Turken to compare the size with the others. The hens are a great size for meat birds but they also lay well, so we are hoping to keep those characteristics in the next generation. We will be testing the incubator today and starting incubation tomorrow if all goes well.

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Of the six free Bantam/Cochin roosters that we got, we still have four. We butchered two already to cut back the male population in the flock a bit.

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RABBITS

We had four rabbits, three does and one buck, but then @smailer bought us a Chinchilla Rabbit doe. The kids named her Silver.

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We let her breed with our buck, Cookie.

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We also bred two our other does, Brownie and Polkadot. The rabbit above is Brownie.

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This one is Polkadot.

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A neighbor let his buck Bugs stop over to say hi to the ladies. Since our buck Cookie is their brother we decided to use another buck for breeding with them.

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We have not yet bred Runaway, but will sometime after this batch of bunnies is born. We will have a different male come over to "marry" her, so that the genetics are a little more varied. The bunnies from Silver, Brownie, and Polkadot should show up in a few weeks, so we will keep you posted.

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I made this heavy duty multi-rabbit cage a bit ago too. I has six separate cages and features a manure collection system where the manure rolls down a slanted metal sheet into a gutter and then goes into a five gallon bucket. This makes the rabbit manure very easy to use in the garden for fertilizer. I'll probably build another one soon.

PIGS

I had picked up three hogs a bit ago. They were Large Black and Berkshire crossed. I got two young sows and one young boar.

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Then @smailer purchased this sow for us, which is a Large Black and Red Wattle cross.

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They eat a lot of our scraps and garden waste for us, and we should start breeding them in the spring. Right now we are keeping them in some concrete pig pegs that are nearby, but we want to build a nice fence for them soon and get them out to pasture. Many pigs will do very well in the pasture, and the more greens that they eat the better.

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CONCLUSION

In the future, we plan on having many more animals. In fact, @smailer and @exploretraveler have already donated some more steem and steem dollars towards getting a milk goat. We are about halfway to reaching our full purchase price. As the chicks hatch and the bunnies are born, I'll be sure to do some updates full of cure pictures.

As always, I'm @papa-pepper and here's the proof:

proof-of-farm-animals

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